Those Above: The Empty Throne Book 1 (22 page)

‘You find a weed, and you’d burn the field?’ the Aubade said crisply. ‘What magnificent gardens you must possess.’

‘If the Lord of the Red Keep has quite finished sharpening his nails,’ the Wright interrupted, ‘perhaps he might clarify his point? Should my brother feel the constable to be incompetent to hold his position, I hardly suppose the Conclave will resist him in appointing another.’

‘And replace him with whom? Another, equally incompetent? The issue at hand is not with the constable, who is no better nor worse than any of his colleagues. The issue is that we have forsaken our responsibility to govern the entirety of our city, have abdicated the duties demanded of us so long and so thoroughly that they have devolved onto an individual such as this.’ The Aubade gestured at the unfortunate constable, who, despite having no idea what was being said, seemed to have some sense that it was not complimentary.

‘And does the Fifth Rung so often enjoy the presence of the Lord of the Red Keep?’ the Glutton asked.

‘Your blow is well aimed – I am as much at fault as any among you. And we can well see what effect this neglect has had. Those Below look to us to guide and teach them, to watch over and protect them. We have failed to do so, and the result is violence, anarchy, disorder. My Lord of the Ebony Towers speaks of collective responsibility, but he has confused the guilty parties. Each and every one of us stands condemned – it is to us that the governance of the city has been given, and it is we who bear the weight for the misery of its inhabitants.’

Looking about the Conclave, Calla hardly had the impression that the collected Eldest were overwhelmed by their sense of shame.

‘And what is it you would have us do, then?’ the Prime asked finally.

‘I propose that the Conclave send a committee to the lower Rungs, to determine what grievances have caused this act of rebellion, and to determine what means are required to satisfy those grievances.’

‘You meet antagonism with an open palm?’ the Shrike asked. ‘Would one train a raptor in such a fashion, or discipline a dog?’

‘My sibling is welcome to visit my aviary whenever he wishes a lesson on proper husbandry,’ the Aubade said smoothly. ‘And it speaks ill of his wit that he can imagine no way to change a thing’s behaviour save by beating it.’

‘Who among us would make up this commission?’ the Prime asked quickly.

Since the Founding, when Those Above had foresworn the wandering of their ancestors to create and populate the Roost, to leave the summit of the city was considered, if not quite blasphemous, at the very least extremely distasteful. The Eldest lived in the sky, or as close to it as they could reach, and in general left the First Rung only to make war.

‘Myself, of course,’ the Aubade said. ‘And also my Lord of the Sidereal Citadel, if he were so inclined. I would hope that the Prime herself would appreciate the gravity of this situation, and act accordingly, though of course I do not presume to speak for her.’

The Prime stood silent for a moment, though it was impossible to read anything of her thoughts on her perfect, immutable face. ‘I shall accompany you,’ she said simply.

The Wright agreed as well, though he looked less than pleased about it, and it was starting to seem that the Conclave might finally come to an end when the Shrike spoke up unexpectedly. ‘I could hardly allow my esteemed siblings to undergo the discomfort of a descent without agreeing to share their sufferings.’

The Aubade stared stiffly at the Shrike but said nothing. There was nothing to be said – the Shrike had as much right to join the committee as anyone, could not be kept off it. The Prime nodded and declared the Conclave over, and the meeting broke up like a rain cloud burned off by the noonday sun, the Eternal disappearing through the great white-gold doors that led to their pleasure craft. Even after a lifetime of observing them, Calla found herself in something like awe of the matchless synchronicity, each individual moving as smoothly and exactly as if they had been a flock of geese turning in flight. Of course, their human servants mucked up the gears some, bumped into each other or teetered down the stairs, but still – one had the sense that if it were not for the humans, the few thousand Wellborn present could have evacuated the building in a flat half-minute.

Calla could appreciate the viewpoint because, alone among the assemblage, the Aubade did not bother to move, remained watching the Source long after the rest of the Conclave had disappeared, staring into its waters without comment or motion. ‘And so they scatter back to their games, even as the very thing starts to blaze,’ he whispered in the High Tongue, after many moments had passed.

For once even Calla had the good sense to pretend she hadn’t heard anything.

B
as stood in a vast and sumptuous hall, overly vast and overly sumptuous by any conceivable standards, let alone the rustic ones to which Bas held. He was watching the crowd and resolutely not playing with his collar, though it was an act of will to resist ripping off his stiff, hideous robes and running out into the bushes, naked and screaming.

An inappropriate coda to the gathering, which after all had been thrown in his honour, as part of the general revelry accompanying his ascension to Strategos. Nominally, at least, though it did not seem to Bas that the hundreds of strangers surrounding him needed their arms twisted to attend a party.

He had reached the capital two days before, spent the better part of the interim being gawked at or fed, something between a circus freak and a pig being fattened for slaughter. That afternoon he had received the medal of Blessed Terjunta, official emblem of his promotion. He had thought that would be the end of it, which in retrospect was clear foolishness. Nothing in the capital happened without a gala to celebrate it.

Bas noticed the senator who had given him his honour approaching out of the corner of his eye, steeled himself for the conversation as he had in the past prepared for a cavalry charge. On the senator’s arm was one of that staggeringly beautiful race of courtesans the capital bred like cattle, round-chested and hollow-eyed. Accompanying them was a small pack of very important people whose names Bas had not bothered to learn. He’d have been grateful if they’d been willing to offer him the same courtesy.

‘Hail Bas the Caracal, executor of justice, the shield behind which Aeleria flourishes.’

The day had been filled with these flourishes, each new interlocutor vying to cover him in panegyric. It had become quite winding. ‘Senator Gratian,’ he said.

Bas would have preferred to look at the senator and feel nothing – it wasn’t his business to feel anything for the senator. But were he to have been honest, Bas did feel something, and that thing was not kind. A fat man, was the senator, though no doubt he would have called himself stout or hardy or some other word clever men invent to make white sound black. The senator couldn’t have carried a pack for half a day’s march, let alone stood shoulder to shoulder with a pike in his hands, but at his order tens of thousands of men would launch themselves across the map, death and terror trailing close behind.

‘Long years it’s been since I’ve seen you, old friend. Not since the fall of Dycia.’ Gratian had been the ambassador to that nation in the days just before it fell. Fell was the wrong way to put it – was pushed, one had to acknowledge, and Gratian had done quite a bit to set the thing teetering. ‘Fifteen years, and it’s as fresh in my mind as the morning’s rain.’

To whom was he speaking? The big-titted bitch on his arm? Presumably her presence in Gratian’s bed was a guarantee. Or was it the other senator in sackcloth standing beside him, who reeked of sweat and self-importance, and who Bas felt fairly certain was trying to manoeuvre himself in such a fashion as to have Bas’s shoulders brush against his chest? Certainly he wasn’t talking to Bas. ‘My memory isn’t what it was,’ Bas said, turning to the drink in his hand, a too-sweet summer wine that he didn’t care for but finished anyway.

Gratian began to speak to his woman with the awkward deliberateness of a theatre aside. ‘The Caracal is modest, as is proper for a soldier. But a politician is bound to no such code, and I can tell you that nothing could be more calculated to inspire awe in the heart of any true-born son of Aeleria than the sight of our victorious forces bringing the Dycian menace to heel. The Caracal carried the battlements all but single-handed, his great red blade singing a song of terror among the hordes.’

How the senator could see any of that, having been a good cable back from the front lines, ensconced in a tent that could have comfortably fitted half a thema, Bas was not sure. In fact Bas could remember very little of it himself, the taking of Dycia having been lost amidst the innumerable scenes of bloodshed clotting his memory. ‘Singing a song of terror’, by the gods.

Bas noticed he was holding on to an empty glass, took it as an excuse to absent himself. Gratian didn’t seem to much mind – greeting him had been a way to remind everyone of how important he was, and of his long history, perhaps even friendship with the Caracal, and there was no point in Bas staying around to spoil the myth.

Bas flagged down a house slave, let him pour some of what everyone else was sipping into his cup.

Issac was sitting at a table drinking very heavily and staring out at the assemblage, the red ruin of his ears clear in the lamplight. Theophilus had been quickly stolen away by a mass of young men and women, friends from a youth that seemed far removed. He had his arm round a very pretty girl but Bas could see by his expression he wasn’t listening to whatever it was she was saying. Bas wondered why the very pretty girl was unable to discern the same at so much shorter a distance.

Hamilcar was the only one enjoying himself, taking up a place by the bar and holding court with a cast of inebriates thrilled at the novelty of speaking to a black man. Hamilcar had found the approach to the centre of Aelerian civilisation to be an unalloyed pleasure, thrilled at each stuttering step away from the plains, from the public baths to the improved quality of whoreflesh. He had also somehow managed to acquire what he insisted was the costume native to his people, a leopard-print robe and a strange, brimless hat. It was almost indescribably ugly, and in all his time in Dycia Bas had never seen a man wear anything of the sort. But it was what the crowd seemed to want, and Hamilcar enjoyed living down to the expectations of his audience.

‘A charming city, your capital,’ he was saying. ‘Though I’m afraid it’s got nothing to match Old Dycia. The water warm as the air, the little gardens of palm and avocado and pineapple, the ladies in their gossamer, light as perfume.’

‘I’ve heard it’s a lovely climate,’ said a busty woman with enough make-up round her eyes to be mistaken for a badger.

‘It is said the weather breeds the finest roses, and the most potent men.’

Hamilcar’s soon-to-be lover made a little tittering laugh that Bas found to be just the wrong side of vile. Presumably Hamilcar felt differently. What her husband thought – or so Bas assumed the perfumed sot holding her arm to be – Bas could not say.

‘Hamilcar,’ Bas interrupted. ‘A moment.’

‘Please do excuse me,’ Hamilcar said, smiling at each member of the couple in turn. ‘The Strategos calls, and it is not for us mere mortals to dispute the will of the Caracal himself.’

The halfwits that Hamilcar had been overawing looked at Bas with something more like bewilderment than curiosity, the same look he’d been getting since he’d left the Marches, as if he had a second head growing next to his first. Bas took Hamilcar by the arm and walked him over to a corner.

‘Watch yourself,’ Bas said. ‘These bluebloods love an excuse to stab a man with a sword. I saw two senators kill each other the night before Scarlet Fields because one had said something disrespectful about the other’s boots. You’d think they could have just waited twelve hours, let the demons save them all the fuss.’

‘You underestimate the depravity of our surroundings,’ Hamilcar said, ‘if you imagine infidelity to be a duelling offence. The Third Consul just finished offering me his wife, on the condition that he be allowed to watch.’

‘Really?’

‘Not in so many words. But one knows these things. Besides, the day has not yet come when one of these silk-wearing tarts can best a Dycian with a length of steel.’

‘They’ll hang you if you win,’ Bas said. ‘That’s the other thing I learned during our campaign against the demons. The nobles don’t play fair.’

Hamilcar smiled. ‘Neither do I.’

Bas shrugged and let the matter drop. You could only warn a man so much. And Hamilcar could handle himself, even amidst this nest of vipers. Bas had only really broken him out of his group as an excuse to speak with someone he didn’t despise. Maybe Hamilcar even realised that, because he didn’t make any effort to leave.

It had not taken Bas long to realise that, though this particular celebration was nominally in honour of his recent promotion, and though he had not been in the capital for decades, he was at very best the second most-looked-at person there, and perhaps even the third. Taking primacy of place were a once-beautiful woman and the still-beautiful man who held her arm, the two of them surrounded by a knot of courtiers as thick as flies on fresh shit.

Bas paid little attention to the subtleties of Aelerian internal politics, but then again, one did not need to be a priest to have heard of Enkedri. And, so best as Bas could figure, Eudokia Aurelia held a roughly similar position within the capital to that which the Self-Created was said to enjoy on a larger scale. The Revered Mother, the Spider Queen, the Imperial whore. The conservative black dress she wore seemed out of keeping with her last title, though the sharp blue of her eyes spoke strongly to the one prior.

Next to her was the man who, if rumour could be credited, was to take charge of the expedition that – anyone with eyes in their head could see – was going to be launched against Salucia. Konstantinos, son of Phocas the Beloved, lost at Scarlet Fields during the great charge that had settled the Seventh Other War.